Salience, or Voting as if the Environment Matters

Salience, or Voting as if the
Environment Matters

The path to a green energy future
and a stable climate is clearer than ever-but we do need to start voting to put
ourselves on it.

The professor who taught my college
introductory political science course greatly emphasized a dry little word: salience-a measure of how much
people's opinions on a given subject actually influence how they vote. Issues
that are immediate or the subject of great passion, such as one's job, or
religious freedom, usually have high voter salience.

In the United States in the 1980s,
the global environment was the definitive low-salience issue. Everyone, it
seemed, agreed that the environment should be protected, but politicians did
little. They got elected to address more immediate concerns, such as tax cuts.
Studying global sustainability at that time was both extraordinarily exciting
and extremely frustrating, because so little public attention was focused on
huge problems like fossil-fuel use and the specter of global warming, the AIDS
epidemic, deforestation, the global extinction crisis, and the threat of more
nuclear accidents in the wake of Chernobyl. I think my Worldwatch colleagues
and I sometimes felt that we were shouting into the wind.

When I arrived at Worldwatch
Institute in January 1988-on the day the first issue of this magazine came
out-gasoline cost about $1.46 per gallon in the United States (in today's
dollars), the average car or light truck got about 22 miles per gallon (9.4
km/liter), and Americans drove about 2 trillion miles (3.2 trillion km) a year.
Since then, the Berlin Wall has fallen, the Internet has transformed global
communications and markets, world population is up by 1.5 billion, and the
global climate is warmer by about a third of a degree Celsius.

Some things, however, seem very
much the same. The U.S. government is split between a conservative Republican
president and a Democratic Congress. The president opposes most environmental
initiatives and is closely allied to the energy industry. A presidential
campaign is picking up speed but the candidates are paying little attention to
environmental issues. Oil remains the lifeblood of the American economy and the
average car or light truck gets about 21 miles to the gallon (8.9 km/liter).
Gasoline prices have risen, but Americans are driving roughly a trillion more
miles (1.6 trillion km) each year.

Blame American energy policy, which
is basically to keep energy cheap no matter what the cost. Cheap oil in the
1980s and 1990s made it logical for millions of Americans to buy SUVs and move
to remote suburbs, and suburban sprawl is the primary factor behind the growth
in driving and fuel consumption. You can now drive 30-50 miles (50-80 km) out
of many major cities and see subdivisions from which people commute to the
urban core or inner suburbs. Greater New York City now reaches west and south
across New Jersey into Pennsylvania, where it merges with other metropolitan
areas. The conurbation loosely termed Los Angeles now stretches 90 miles (145
km) or more in some directions. In pursuit of seemingly cheap housing at the
urban fringe, many people are now spending hours a day driving to jobs,
schools, and shopping, and spending budget-busting amounts on cars and
increasingly expensive fuel. This phenomenon is probably closely related to the
sub-prime mortgage crisis that has been grabbing recent headlines.

Meanwhile, the ecological costs of
our addiction to oil are becoming clearer every day. Global warming is
proceeding apace. The melting in the Arctic, for example, appears to be
accelerating sharply. As of mid-August, Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent
ever observed, with perhaps a month of melt left to go. Some scientists believe
that we may already have reached key climatic tipping points, making the loss
of the massive Greenland ice sheet inevitable. Greenland contains enough frozen
water to raise global sea level by 7 meters. Antarctica contains far more.

Faced with stark evidence of the
consequences of our energy policy, the political system has, so far, ducked.
Most politicians seem to be fixated on magic bullets, technologies that somehow
will solve all our problems. High among these are alternative motor vehicle
fuels, a subject that World Watch
(and I) covered extensively in the magazine's early years. Ethanol from corn
has received a major boost from the U.S. Congress, in the form of high
subsidies and a mandate for 7.5 billion gallons (28 billion liters) of annual
production by 2012. In response, ethanol plants are being built at a frantic
pace, and corn and farmland prices are up sharply. An unexpected boom has
developed in the construction of grain bins, so farmers can dry and store their
own grain, and sell it to ethanol plants at the times they need it the most.
Worldwatch founder Lester Brown believes that ethanol production may absorb up
to half of U.S. corn output by the 2008 harvest. Even if it does, ethanol would
still only satisfy 6 percent of U.S. gasoline demand. Some hope that ethanol
will soon be made in quantity from cellulosic sources, such as grasses or crop
wastes, but the technology remains commercially unproven.

Synthetic fuels, one of the
greatest boondoggles of the 1970s, are also back. World Watch covered the then-little-noticed Canadian
effort to produce oil from tar sands in 1988. Since then, production has risen
by a factor of six, to more than a million barrels per day, creating a boom in
Canadian oil. It has also created a very large, very lightly publicized, toxic
mess in northern Alberta (see "Tar Sands Fever," September/October). Most of
the oil goes to Canada's southern neighbor, where national politicians
(including, remarkably, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama) have
proposed new federal programs to produce liquid fuels from coal. The processes
involved are dirty, capital-intensive, and guaranteed to sharply increase
carbon emissions, unless unproven technologies to capture and store CO2
are developed and shown to be economical.

Subsidies for alternative fuels,
though they may be useful in jump-starting new markets, miss the point in a
warming world. Though alternatives may reduce U.S. oil imports, if carbon
emissions cost nothing there is no incentive for low-carbon energy
sources-including efficiency improvements-to win out over high-carbon ones. The
danger of implementing poorly thought out new energy policies with oil prices
already so high is that the drive for new supplies becomes much more intense.
In an era when the need to cut emissions of greenhouse gases is dire, small
mistakes can rapidly become very big ones. An energy future in which U.S.
coal-to-liquids plants, Canadian oil sands, and a large share of the U.S. corn
crop fuel hybrid SUVs-optimized for speed, not fuel efficiency-will only
exacerbate global warming.

This brings us back to the question
of salience. World Watch was
founded on the premise that more accessible information on the ways the
environment affects our lives-and vice versa-might help inform the public
debate and lead to political solutions. The relevance of global environmental
health to our daily lives is obvious now in ways unimagined 20 years ago. Yet
our politicians are giving us policy proposals that are little more
sophisticated than those of 20, or even 30, years ago. Real pressure for them
to change will have to come from the ballot box. Are Americans ready to vote as
if the environment really matters?

John E. Young is an independent
writer and consultant on global environmental issues.